"Yes."
He reached for his hat and cane and a pair of untried gray gloves atop
them. "I sent the yellow taffeta out on a C.O.D. That gold buckle she
wanted on the shoulder cost her just twenty bucks more."
"Good!"
He fitted on his hat carefully and snapped his gloves across his palm.
"Well, I'm off, madam."
She adjusted her hat in a simulation of indifference. "Like to come up
to the flat for supper and--and go over the books, Phonzie?"
"Huh?"
"There's plenty for two and--and we could kind of go over things."
He twirled his cane. "Oh, I--I'm running up there too often, sponging
off you."
"Sponging! Like I'd ask you if I didn't want you!"
"I been up there sponging off you three times this week. Anyways, I'm--"
"Don't I always just give you pot luck?"
"Yes, but you'll think afterwhile that I got you mixed up with my
meal-ticket."
A sensitive seepage of blood rushed over Madam Moores's nervous face,
stinging it. "Of course, if you won't want to come!"
"Don't want to come! A fellow that's never had a snap like your cozy
corner in his life--"
"Of course if--if you got a date with one of--of the models or
something."
"I never said that, did I?"
"Well, get that sponging idea out of your head, Phonzie. There's always
plenty for two in my cupboard. Like I says the other night, what's the
use being able to afford my little flat if I can't get some pleasure out
of it?"
"It sure looks good to this hall-room Johnnie."
She gathered her gloves and her black silk handbag. "Then come,
Phonzie," she said, "I'm going to take you home." And her throat might
have been lined with fur.
They went out together, locking the doors behind them, and into an
evening as soft as silk and full of stars.
Along the wide up-town street the human tide flowed fast and as if thaw
had set in, releasing it from the bondage of winter. Girls in light
wraps and without hats loitered in the white flare of drugstore lights.
Here and there a brown stoop bloomed with a boarder or two. In front
of Seligman's florist shop, which occupied the ground floor of Madam
Moores's dressmaking establishment, Alphonse Michelson paused for a
moment in the flare of its decorative show-window and flecked at his
hatband with sheer untried handkerchief.
"Come on, Phonzie."
"Coming, madam."
In the up-town Subway, bound for the up-town flat, he leaned to her with
his small blond mustache raised in a smile.
"Where's the book, madam?"
"Forgot it," she replied, without shame.
* * * * *
Out of three hundred and eighty dollars cash, a bit of black and gold
brocade flung adroitly over the imitation hearth, a cot masquerading
under a Mexican afghan of many colors, a canary in a cage, a potted
geranium, a shallow chair with a threadbare head-rest, a lamp, a rug, a
two-burner gas-stove, Madam Moores had evolved Home.
And why not? The Petit Trianon was built that a queen might there find
rest from marble halls. The Borghese women in their palaces live behind
drawn shades, but Italian peasants sit in their low doorways and sing as
they rock and suckle.
In Madam Moores's two-flights-up flat the windows were flung open to the
moist air of spring, which flowed in cool as water between crisp muslin
curtains, stirring them. In the sudden flare of electric light the
canary unfolded its head from a sheaf of wing, cheeped, and fell to
picking up seed from the bottom of its cage.
Mr. Alphonse Michelson collapsed into the shallow chair beside the table
and relaxed his head against the threadbare dent in the upholstery.
"Whoops! home never was like this!"
"Is him tired?"
"Dead."
"Smoke?"
"Yep."
"There."
"Ah!"
"Now him all comfy and I go fix poor tired bad boy him din-din."
More native than mother-tongue is Mother's tongue. Whom women love
they would first destroy with gibberish. To Mr. Michelson's linguistic
credit, however, he shifted in his chair in unease.
"What did you say?"
"What him want for din-din?"
He slung one slim leg atop the other, slumping deeper to the luxury of
his chair. "Dinner?"
"Yes, din-din."
"Say, those were swell chicken livers smothered in onions you served the
other night, madam. Believe me, those were some livers!"
No, reader, Romance is not dead. On the contrary, he has survived the
frock-coat and learned to chew a clove.
A radiance as soft as the glow from a pink-shaded lamp flowed over Madam
Moores's face.
"Livers him going to have and biscuits made in my own ittsie bittsie
oven. Eh?"
"Swell."
She divested herself of her wraps, fluffing her mahogany-colored hair
where the hat had restricted it, lighted a tiny stove off in the tiny
kitchenette and enveloped herself in a blue-bib-top apron. Her movements
were short and full of caprice, and when she set the table, brushing his
chair as she passed and repassed, lights came out in her eyes when she
dared raise her lids to show them.
They dined by the concealed fireplace and from off a table that could
fold its legs under like Aladdin's. Fumes of well-made coffee rose as
ingratiating as the perfume of a love story. Mr. Michelson dropped a
lump of butter into the fluffy heart of a biscuit and clapped the halves
together.
"Some biscuits!"
"Bad boy, stop jollying."
"Say, if I'd tell you the truth about what I think of these biscuits,
you'd say I was writing a streetcar advertisement for baking-powder.
Say, this is some cup custard!"
"More?"
"Full to my eyebrows."
"Just a little bittsie?"
"Nope."
He lighted a cigarette and they settled back in after-dinner
completeness, their dessert-plates pushed well toward the center of the
table and their senses quiet. She pleated the edge of her napkin and
watched him blow leisurely spirals of smoke to the ceiling.
"What you thinking about, Phonzie?"
"Nothing."
"Honest?"
"If I was thinking at all I was just sizing it up as pretty soft for a
fellow like me to get this sort of stand-in with--with my boss. Gawd! me
and Roth used to love each other like snakes."
"I--I ain't your boss, Phonzie. Don't I give you the run of
everything--hiring the models and all?"
"Sure you're my boss, and it's pretty soft for me."
"And I was just thinking, Phonzie, that it's pretty soft for me to have
found a fellow like you to manage things for me."
"Shucks!"
"Without you, so used to the ways of the Avenue and all that kind of
thing, where would I be now, trying to run in the right kind of bluff
with the trade?"
"That's easy! After all, Fifth Avenue and Third Avenue is pretty much
alike in the end, madam. A spade may be a spade, but if you're a good
salesman, you can put it on black velvet and sell it for a dessert-spoon
any day in the week."
"That's just what I'm saying, Phonzie, about you're knowing how. I
needed just a fellow like you to show me how the swell trade has got
to be blindfolded, and that the difference between a dressmaker and a
modiste is about a hundred and fifty dollars a gown."
"You ought to see the way we handled them when I was on the floor for
Roth. Say, we wouldn't touch a peignoir in that establishment for under
two hundred and fifty, and--we had 'em coming in there like sheep. The
Riverside Drive trade is nothing, madam, compared to what we could do
down there with the Avenue business."
"You sure know how to handle the lorgnette bunch, Phonzie."
"Is it any wonder, being in the business twenty years?"
"Twenty years! Why, Phonzie, you--you don't look much more than twenty
yourself."
He laughed, shifting one knee to the other. "That's because you can't
see that my eye teeth are gold, madam."
"You're so light on your feet, Phonzie, and slick."
"To look twenty and feel your forty years ain't what it's cracked up to
be. If I had a home of my own, you know what I'd buy first--a pair of
carpet slippers and a patent rocker."
"I bet you mean it, too, Phonzie."
"Sure I mean it! How'd you like to go through life like me, trying to
keep the kink ironed in my hair and out of my back, or lose my job at
the only kind of work I'm good for? It's like having to live with a grin
frozen on your face so you can't close your mouth."
"I--I just can't get over it, Phonzie, you _forty_! You five years older
than me and me afraid--thinking all along it was just the other way."
"I had already shed my milk teeth before you were born, madam."
"Whatta you know about that!"
"Ask Gert. She's been following me around from place to place for years,
sticking to me because I say there ain't a model in the business can
show the clothes like she can."
"Yes?"
"Ask her; she's my age and we been on the job together for twenty years.
Long before live models was even known in the business, she and me were
showing goods in the old Cunningham place on Madison Avenue."
"Even--even back there you was dead set on having good figures around
the place, wasn't you, Phonzie?"
"I tell you it's economy in the end, madam, to have figures that can
show off the goods to advantage."
"Oh, I'm not kicking, Phonzie, but I was just saying."
"I have been in the business long enough, madam, to learn that the
greatest way in the world to show gowns is on live stock. A dame will
fall for any sort of a rag stuck on a figure like Gert's, and think the
waist-line and all is thrown in with the dress. You seen for yourself
Van Ness order five gowns right off Gert's back to-day. Would she have
fallen for them if we had shown them in the hand? Not much! She forgot
all about her own thirty-eight waist-line when she ordered that pink
organdie. She was seeing Gert's twenty-two inches."
"But honest, Phonzie, take a girl like Gert, even with her figure,
she--Oh, I don't know, there's something about her!"
"She may rub your fur the wrong way, madam, but under all her flip ways
they don't come no finer than Gert."
"No, it ain't that, only she don't always get across. Take Lipton;
she won't even let her show her a gown; she's always calling for Dodo
instead. Sometimes I think the trade takes exceptions to a girl like
Gert, her all decked out in diamonds that--show how--how fly she must
be."
"Gertie Dobriner's the best in the business, just the same, madam. She
ain't stuck on her way of living no more than I am, but she's a model
and she 'ain't got enough of anything else in her to make the world
treat her any different than a model."
"I'm not saying she ain't a good thirty-six, Phonzie."
"I got to hand it to her, madam, when it comes to a lot of things. She
may be a little skylarker, but take it from me, it ain't from choice,
and when she likes you--God! honest, I think that girl would pawn her
soul for you. When I was down with pneumonia--"
"I ain't saying a thing against her."
"She's no saint, maybe, but then God knows I'm not, either, and what I
don't know about her private life don't bother me."
"Oh, I--I know you like her all right."
"Say, I'll bet you any amount if that girl had memory enough to learn
the words of a song or the steps of a dance, she could have landed a
first-row job in any musical show on Broadway. She could do it now, for
that matter. Gad! did you see her to-day showing off that Queen Louise
cloth-of-gold model? Honest, she took my breath away, and I been on the
floor with her twenty years."
"Y-yes."
"Keep down your hips and waist-line, Gert, I always say to her, and you
are good in the business for ten years yet."
"She should worry while the crop of four carats is good."
"Yes, but just the same a girl like her don't know when her luck may
turn. A girl can lose her luck sometimes before she loses her figure."
"Any old time she can lose her luck with you."
"Me!"
"Yes, you!"
Madam Moores bent over the pleats in her napkin. Opposite her, his
cigarette held fastidiously aloft, he regarded her through its haze.
"Well, of all things! So that--that's what you think?"
"I--I know."
"Know what?"
"That she's dead strong for you."
"Sure she is, but what's that got to do with it? That girl's like--well,
she's like a sister or--or a pal to me, but she's got about as much time
for a fellow of my pace, except when she gets blue, as--as the Queen of
Sheba has."
"That's what you think, maybe, but everybody else knows she--she's been
after you for years, trying--"
"Aw, cut the comedy, madam. Honest, you make me sore. She's nothing
to me off the floor but a darn good pal. Say, I can treat her to a
sixty-cent table d'hôte twice a week; but don't you think in the back
of my head, when it comes to a showdown, that I couldn't even buy silk
shoelaces for a girl of her kind. I ain't her pace and we both know it.
Bosh!"
"You'd like to be, all right, if--if she didn't have so many rich ones
hanging around."
"Just the same, many's the time she's told me if she could land a
regular fellow and do the regular thing and settle down on seventy-five
a month in a Harlem flat, why she'd drop all this skylarking of hers for
a family of youngsters, so quick it would make your head swim."
"Sure, that's just what I say, she--"
"Many's the time she--she's cried to me--just cried, because the kind of
life she has to live don't lead to anything, and she knows it."
"I ain't blaming you for liking her, Phonzie; a girl with her figure can
make an old dub like me look like--well, I just guess after her I--I
must look like thirty cents to you."
"You! Say, you got more real sense in your little finger than three of
Gert's kind put together."
She colored like a wild rose.
"Sense ain't what counts with the men nowadays; it's looks and--and
speed like Gert's."
"Girls like Gert are all right, I tell you; but say, when it comes to
real brains like yours--nobody home."
"Maybe not, but just the same it's the girls with sense get tired having
the men rave about their smartness and pass on, to go rushing after a
empty head completely smothered under yellow curls. That's how much
_real_ brains counts for with--with you men."
He flung her a gesture, his cigarette trailing a design in smoke.
"Honest, madam, you got me wrong there. A fellow like me 'ain't got the
nerve to--to go after a woman like you. A girl like Dodo or Gert is my
size, but I'd be a swell dub trying to line up alongside of you, now
wouldn't I?"
Tears that were distilled in her heart rose to her eyes, dimming them.
Her hand fluttered in among the plates and cups and saucers toward him.
"Phonzie, I--I--"
"You what?"
"I--I--Aw, nothing."
Her head fell suddenly forward in her arms, pushing the elaborate
coiffure awry, and beneath the blue-checked apron her shoulders heaved.